Category Archives: Work

There is much more to say about the world-soul introduced last week. In particular the role of animals was not even mentioned yet is a substantial part of earth’s sentience. I hope to circle around to this subject again but today we are going to shift gears a bit. We are on the hunt for some clarification around the relationships between truth, belief, character, fundamentalism, and mental agility. There is a tradition of mind training in Tibetan Mahayana Buddhism. Today I’d like to introduce a bit of a western spin on the same idea.

Any statement made can be classified as belonging to a logical category. Some might belong to more than one category depending on how they are interpreted. I just mention this in passing but it can become a crucial key for proper understanding at times. These logical categories include:

True or False – It is 90 degrees outside right now.
More or Less Likely – It’s very likely the Larson C ice sheet will break off this year.
Meaningless – Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Indeterminate – The god who made this universe loves war.

The first step in this western mind training is to simply recognize that these different categories exist. It is like having a number of different tools on your cognitive tool belt so that there is a good chance the right one will be at hand when it is needed. Many people are confused, and many messages are deliberately designed to be confusing, about the type of truth claims that are possible. Keeping in mind this full spectrum of possibilities can aid us in our quest to minimize our ignorance.

Without awareness of this whole collection it is not possible to identify that which is the real mystery in our midst, that which many label god. In the typically complimentary way of the psyche, the only way to get a handle on just what the human mind can know is to become real clear about what it cannot. To see the mystery we need to remove the mystification. To that end its worth pointing out the important characteristic of the meaningless statement which is that it was designed by Noam Chomsky to be syntactically correct but semantically meaningless. A whole lot of messages over our airwaves amount to little more than this when analyzed. As a reminder those who need to strengthen their understanding of likelihood are encouraged to peek at the probability material on this site.

It is, however, the last category of indeterminate statements that is the interesting one which we are going to explore in this post. Be prepared for some rather dense psychological material and groping speculation.

People are free to assert any number of things for which the only proper response is “could be.” The rub is that very often the person making said statement believes in it as if it were as real as rocks. Other people doubting its veracity then become construed as threatening to their position. Why? I think the answer deals with a fundamental difference in the positions people take towards knowledge. Some people are certain they know the truth. Religious, scientific, psychological, whatever the field, these persons adhere to certainty. Their position is related to extroversion and the Western theological tradition of making positive statements about what god is. God is Love we are taught, God is X is the pattern. Certainly the term God however, if it means anything at all, points to that existential mystery at the heart of existing that far exceeds full human understanding. Granting that, whenever we assert God is X we should immediately add ‘and not X.’ If we say God is fair and just, for example, we stay real by adding but not as humans are fair and just. This is related to the apophatic Eastern theological traditions and introversion. This represents a different core psychological position persons can take towards truth. These people are not certain they know the truth but are quite certain about what they believe to be the truth, even while recognizing it is possible that they are mistaken.

Statements that can be true or false conclusively are the domain of deductive logic or direct observation. Inductive logic allows drawing generalized conclusions by reasoning along the lines of the most or least probable. The meaningless statements exist outside the bounds of logic and serve other masters than verbal truth such as deception or aesthetics or simply a poetic frolic with language engaged in for the fun of it. Which leaves us with the final category. There is something about the indeterminate category which causes a rather profound difference between how people approach the world and each other.

My suggestion is that their positions revolve around an individual’s understanding which is where the bits and bytes of knowledge are linked to what we human beings find meaningful. Though the knowledge is collective, the interpretation of it is resolutely individual. What something means to us is what we can only fully encounter by taking account of our dreams about it, how our perspective about it has changed over the long decades of a lifetime, and how this understanding of ours has ultimately affected our behavior. It takes all of this to account for what we find meaningful or not because it takes all of this to provide the details of our own stories which differ from anyone else’s.

Understanding gains this cognitive feature because it is built, at least in part (and often the most important part) by using symbols. Symbols turn their face to us but their backsides reach into the unplumbed depths. Mind’s interface with will, the source of the bodymind’s movements and desires, includes encounters with non-conceptual energies from the biological processes involved. We know what the flag means, for example, as a stand-in for a country, its people and their history. It is also well known how a country’s flag can move men and nations by emotions both noble and base. This nature of symbolism as the simultaneous cognitive and physiological expression of our individual understanding lends itself to the profound commitments we often see people making to them. In a person’s individual experience as it unfolded in a particular culture numerous events made impressions on their character, laying tracks in the bodymind. This is how our understanding grows using the currency of symbolism.

For understanding to grow it must change. Often, due to the nature of what we as individual’s find meaningful being anchored in our hearts, in our physiology, such maturing changes are painful and difficult. There is an unrest in the body that accompanies this dis-quite in the mind when a person’s understanding is shifting. Though we can learn through this experience to be more tolerant of ambiguity and the unknown, nothing wholly removes its sting.

We experience all of this internally. The face we show the world, the persona asserting our place, may or may not be affected by the process. Whether or not that will happen seems to be determined by a number of things, including the size of the shift in understanding taking place. A chemistry student learning about programmed cell death is likely altering the arrangement of her knowledge less than someone suddenly learning her trusted business partner is a crook and murderer. Still, it is not just a matter of how large the changes are. Some people handle torture and others cannot handle being without air conditioning, to be a bit flippant. An unknowable element of character, fate, destiny, or karma is also at play during these shifts in our understanding.

If the persona is affected the rest of the world will know. Public conversions of Republicans to Democrats or Independents are simple examples. Our reputations are on the line once the persona is involved. We don’t need our lives shared in TV coverage to feel that pressure as friends and family play the same role regardless. If we change our minds too radically we expose ourselves, revealing our most vulnerable spots. We state we were previously foolish but now, so we are claiming, we have become wise. Only the shameless can easily endure public exposure of their own personal foolishness when the subjects involved are essential to what things mean among us socially. So the persona is tempted to clamp down and this is the process that creates what has been called character armor. This armor is a physiological tenseness that never gets to relax; it is how we always have our guard up. If we allow this process of shifting understanding to go through to completion without clamping down, even though it hurts, we eventually arrive at a place of congruity between our inner understanding as our bodymind experiences it and the expression of such in the world. Such conditions promote flexibility and suppleness as both physiologically and cognitively we are able to tense or relax as needed. Recall the point made earlier about our own culture’s lack of contentment in the post about Emotional Systems.

My hypothesis is that the armoring approach leaves the persona rather high and dry. Full bodied expressions of will are not characteristic of such people. They often seem disconnectedly intellectual, religious, or whatnot: head in the clouds but no feet on the ground. Here is where the distinction between the core psychological positions seem to have their nexus. The weakened persona tries to compensate for its handicap by asserting certainty not in the beliefs it holds but in the object of those beliefs. By this trick the person(a) seems to remove themselves and be involved in no more than objective statements of fact.

The education with the most profound affects on our understanding, mind training if you will, involve dissolving the character armor. It is a liberation from an untenable position we were tensely holding onto in our ignorance. Seeing mistaken certainty is simultaneously seeing the nature of beliefs. Letting go of the certainty is reclaiming your individuality by recognizing the role of your story in the shaping of your understanding. I think this might be related to wisdom. Harry Wilber in Understandable Jung: The Personal Side of Jungian Psychology has a great sentence capturing what this is all about. The context is his coming to the end of the Jungian analysis all Jungian analysts must go through themselves before they are considered ready to help others. This is from the section entitled ‘Sooner or Later, You Will Have To Become Your Own Analyst.’

“The Wise Old Man I had been talking to
had become myself – wise man, old fool.”

Compassion opens the inner eye of conscience that lives in the depths, far beyond the conscience society’s mores and the persona use for guiding behavior. This is our innermost understanding we are talking about here. Through practice we learn to become certain about what we believe yet remain open to revising these beliefs. We recognize and honor that these beliefs are rooted in the deepest understanding we have about what it means to be a self aware mortal human being – due to the way we have experienced it. They embody our story, a story wonderfully and mysteriously unique from beginning to end. We recognize what is real and true about what is real and true for us. In our unknowing we allow all sentient beings the same freedom because we comprehend the inner world characteristics of the bodymind through our own experience of subjectivity and objectivity.

While we are watching the acceleration of the great clash of monotheisms in the Middle East it is a good time to be strengthening our triage skills. These can be worked with during times of lesser crisis to prepare us for what’s ahead. This is similar to the mind training that the eastern traditions teach. It is a way of practicing with our minds today so that when the day comes that things get difficult (classically in the east this is the day of one’s death) we do not find ourselves without any reserves to call on. Mindful Ecology involves mind trainings that are designed to strengthen a person when lesser deaths occur. These might involve the collapse of the economy, an ecological system, good will among citizens, integrity in government, authenticity among religious leaders, or any number of endings that cause an increase in suffering, anomie, confusion and loss.

No one’s life is spared the rough spots. It is not the case that the wealthy and powerful, or the poor and simple, live a life without serious challenges to keeping sane let alone keeping an open heart. It is not just because of our ecological knowledge that the skills we are talking about have relevance. These are skills that can aid us in any number of life’s arenas. The thoughts in the mind are the earliest seeds of what will become emotions and eventually actions. The actions we perform or refuse to perform are where we find our character reflected back to us from the world soul. Countless decisions over years are expressing something that can be expressed no other way, something about how we are in our innermost.

Along the path of expression from thought to action there is an element of choice. The will uses this element of freedom to express itself. Though circumstances typically constrain our ability to make this expression one that is fully in accord with our desire, there is never so little choice left to a human being that some sense of character cannot be made to dwell within the manner by which their actions are undertaken. I believe the prisoner on their way to their execution still retains some degree of freedom in how they will meet the event. How much more so than do each of us, who are not under such immediate threats, have an opportunity to make real in the world that which is part of our innermost. This expression of true will is always a question of degrees and that is where our training comes in. It is inescapable that each person actually will express their uniqueness, there is no way not to. It is, to put on the science hat, an expression of your parental DNA inheritance and as such a unique biological event. Add the uniqueness of each environment you have inhabited from childhood on and the one of a kind nature of your personality becomes even more obvious. It is important we learn to thoroughly grasp this, see the truth of it, and really hear what is being said. To the best of our human understanding it is a fact that throughout all of deep time and across all of deep space it is astronomically unlikely that the many contingent relationships between your DNA expression and the environment by which it was shaped will ever happen in just the way you have it happening right here and right now. This is it. You have a part to play in dreaming the dream forward, as Carl Jung used to say.

In our time of mass man, mass media, mass armies, and mass movements it has never been more important to understand the role of the other social polarity, namely that of the individual. It is not true for my heart that you could just replace my most beloved friends and family with anyone else. Though another person could play the role of my mother or father, son, daughter, or spouse, there is not the slightest chance I would find my body and mind responding to the newcomer in the same way that it has learned to understand the people that are in my life today. This is true for all of us. Keeping this truth in mind paves the way towards an ability to see the uniqueness of the world around us; to see a tree in the forest and not just so many board feet of lumber.

This is the skill that is lacking in our societies, this ability to appreciate the miracle of the life forms in front of us. We have been trained to fawn before the rich and powerful, presenting them with praises and constant reassurances about how great and awesome they are. Fearing social ostracism otherwise, often with real financial repercussions, it is certainly an understandable habit given the reality of our corporate dominated societies. Still, those are rather false expressions of an appreciation for another person because they are motivated by fear of what they can do to you if you earn their disfavor and the hope that by your flattery and attention they will come to gift you with some of their money and influence. This is very different than looking deeply into another sentient being just for the sake of witnessing their unique expression of the mystery of will. Too often, it seems to me, we cannot even do this among human beings. The way we treat those in our ghettos speaks volumes. It should come as no surprise that we are blind to the faces of the eagles, octopus, wolves, whales, and blue footed boobies. We have an interest in the ocean because it can provide us with food and those who fish it with money and power. If tomorrow a chemist invented fish in a factory, do you think we would do much to save the oceans for their own sake? What real value do we place on the lives of those who dwell in the depths? Just how much lower do we rank them then those many tortured lives in the world’s ghettos?

These are statements in the realm of values, not of facts. The facts are that the uniqueness of DNA expression is undeniable. Facts pass over into values when we recognize that the human mind is born with the potential to know compassion as the highest value but it takes education, real training, to realize that potential. This is another fact we have learned over long millennia in the school of hard knocks. Through our mythology and traditions we do our best to teach the value of compassion to each new generation as it comes along. Though the value of compassion runs counter to the hubris of our egos, it is the sweetest liberty the heart can know: to love others as one loves one’s self, and to love one’s self as one loves others. It makes life meaningful.

Pounding the living daylights out of someone does not make life meaningful; not in an alley and not on a battlefield. Stealing every last dime from the sick and the old does not make life meaningful; not in a hospital and not from a TV preacher’s stage. Deceiving the innocent and gullible does not make life meaningful; not in the most surreal CGI enhanced advertisement and not in the slickest air-brushed glossy publication. Do you know that most confidence men commit suicide or end up paranoid? Do unto others. . .

What intelligent, caring human being are confronted with in the neo-liberal value system is nothing less than a legitimacy of greed promoted through self-inflicted blindness to the needs of any and every living thing that might get in the way of profits. It stands to reason then that intelligent and caring human beings should work hard to find the types of things that will work effectively against this tendency to dehumanization inherent in a mass society ruled by neo-liberal values. This is what the mind training in ecological triage skills is all about.

Last week introduced one classification scheme for statements of fact. The categories lend flexibility to the mind by teaching it to become more comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. These uncomfortable cognitive states are more easily allowed a place within our characters when their scope is properly restricted to those categories of thought in which they are inherent. Knowing certain types of statements can never obtain to 100% certainty is a good way to check our own thinking and to protect our sanity from those who use underhanded techniques to try and persuade us that this is not the case.

What this means in practice is captured pointedly in the schools of cognitive therapy. This is not the therapy of the unconscious mind that is explored by the depth psychologists. Pursuing meaning among the symbols of myth and dream is life-long task for students of the deep psyche. These cognitive therapies, in contrast, are designed to help people as quickly as possible. They seek a rapid recovery from depression, lack of self confidence, pain management, or whatever their client’s debilitating emotional issues involve. In my experience these cognitive mental health techniques have a complimentary role to play alongside personal researches into the deep. These cognitive insights are rooted in the philosophy of the stoics who stressed that while we are not free to control the world, we are free to some degree in choosing how we will meet that world. These ancient insights have been refined through therapeutic need into practical advice. These insights can act as a key that unlocks many of the mental manacles we are shackled with as good little consumers.

There are a number of names these types of therapies are known by but all share the same fundamental insight about the way our thoughts lead to our emotional experiences and how together they lead to the actions we take. Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), invented by Dr. Albert Ellis, is the particular one I will use as I like his rather rascally guru approach. Dr. Aaron T. Beck’s material might be more appealing to others. Mr. Ellis is not for the faint of heart, quick to use the F word and call bullshit bullshit; he is a New Yorker through and through. For me that personality was a perfect delivery mechanism for the message, one that could be summed up as ‘get a spine!’ and ‘stop stinking thinking in its tracks.’ Interested readers should take a look at his over the top How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes, Anything. It delivers the goods.

What these cognitive therapists have found is that when we suffer emotional problems they have a corresponding mental vehicle. The emotions are considered problems because they are proving too extreme for the client to continue living a productive life. Without life events expressing one’s will a person rightly becomes depressed since depression is a signal that what you are doing is not working. You can throw a pity party and bemoan fate till the cows come home but happiness is never found that way, however far down that path you might want to travel. Happiness comes from our sense of competency. We do not need to be genius but we do need to be able to accomplish whatever it is that we consider necessary for our own self respect. What that is remains an on going journey of discovery. It is a lifelong journey of discovery that should, for the most part, keep us enthused to be alive and grateful for each day we get. All too often that enthusiasm is lost in the worries and cares which are rightly born from the tragedies in our lives. What cognitive health entails, then, is not a disregard for bouts of depression when those are needed but a leaning into the wind, setting our rudder by the joy of being alive that is our birthright. We need to learn how to discern between a true need for tears and an unhealthy indulgence in sadness. Cognitive therapy skills can teach us to be childlike, not childish.

What these cognitive sciences have discovered is that we have a set of irrational beliefs as the source of our emotional disturbances. It is not at all hard for those of us who have studied ecology to recognize our societies are currently chock full of irrational beliefs and that they cause us to make decisions as a society that are just down right crazy. Well, that same mechanism plays out in our individual lives as well. When we are disturbed there is some internal dialog that reflects or sustains the extremes under which we are suffering. We gain power over these things to the degree that we recognize how the issues unduly disturbing us are accompanied by thoughts characterized by exaggerations, statements couched in absolutes, or other cognitive errors. We learn to take our skepticism inside and ask our own thoughts, ‘oh really?’

Things are bad. They really are. Things are going to get worse. They really are. It is not the end of the world. It really is not. Our descendants will live in that world. They really will. What we do today matters. It really does.

We will talk about these cognitive skills in coming posts. In this introduction I want to stress how important this particular set of skills can be for those who are willing to contemplate ecological reality. I sit and consider the end of our existing harvesting of ocean stocks in the next few decades, a simple extrapolation from today’s trends in global over-fishing reaching tipping points. I allow myself to feel the implications and feel that it is a bad thing we are currently engaged in making come to pass. It is critical that I do not exaggerate if I am to remain bound to the truth of what I am contemplating. It is not likely to be the end of the future stocks centuries hence, or the end of all the different species, nor even the first and worst die off earth’s precious ocean has ever experienced or will yet again. Now I have provided a safe container for my contemplations. Now I have a good chance of grounding myself in my own knowledge, refusing to pretend I do not understand what I do about the world and our activities in it, yet at the same time refusing to give in to unmitigated despair.

“To challenge your misery, try science. Give it a real chance. Work at thinking rationally, sticking to reality, checking your hypothesis about yourself, about other people, and about the world. Check them against the best observations and facts that you can find. Stop being a Pollyanna. Give up pie-in-the-sky. Uproot your easy-to-come-by wishful thinking. Ruthlessly rip up your childish prayers.
Yes, rip them up! Again – and again – and again.
Will the millennium then arrive? No. Will you never again feel disturbed? I doubt it. Will you reduce your anxiety, depression, and rage to near-zero? Probably not.
But, I can, almost, promise you this: The more scientific, rational, and realistic you become, the less emotionally uptight you will be. Not zero uptight – for that is inhuman or superhuman. But a hell of a lot less. And, as your years go by, and your scientific outlook becomes more solid, less and less neurotic.
Is that a guarantee? No, but a prediction that will probably be fulfilled.”
Albert Ellis, How To Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything Yes, Anything

“These new methods present a unique opportunity to assess the origins of a fundamentally human condition: the costly yet advantageous shift from a primitive “live fast and die young” strategy to the “live slow and grow old” strategy that has helped to make us one of the most successful organisms on the planet.”A Long Childhood is of Advantage, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

The god I believe in is not afraid of science – to crib off U2 – nor reason, psychology, or engineering. Nor does the ground of all being fear the negative way of atheists, for they too see there is a real absence, and that that too is part of the mystery. There is nothing verboten to study, though not all things are equally of benefit to the cause of liberating the student from the shackles of thinking-too-small. All the details of the elemental molecular world are just so many signatures of the all-pervading intelligence that forms the ground of our being. Does that make sense? The truth cannot be one thing in the Sangha, Mosque, Temple or Cathedral, another thing in the laboratory or counseling office, and yet another thing in the streets.

God is a term with so many different possible connotations that without careful definition it is best if we comprehend it as our pointer word; it points to truth or being directly and as such is not a noun, verb, adverb or adjective in any ordinary sense. Eastern traditions are careful to include the emptiness features of any positive assertions when talking carefully about these ultimate things. We see this in Buddhism and in the Eastern Orthodox Church’s Apophatic traditions. I mention this because for some people the thought of allowing a rational, dare I say scientific, view to guide their daily lives seems to be a threat to their faith. In my experience that is not the case. Surrendering ourselves to what is real is the Way.

We are an incredibly complex psychobiological phenomenon actively interpreting and adapting to our environments. With physical bodies always needing to be protected we also use minds to position ourselves within the greater scheme of things that we encounter within our understanding of how the world works. The complex psychobiological phenomenon has evolved in an on-going quest to open to that which nourishes and avoid that which poisons, in fulfillment of life’s primary objective: its own continuous survival obtained by maintaining mental and physical homeostasis. Steer your complex psychobiological phenomenon incorrectly and you end up mad on the one hand or feverish and without immunity on the other. The point of homeostasis in the psychological realm of daytime consciousness is rational discourse.

When we talk with others we project an expression of our character. When we talk to ourselves we do the same thing. This inner dialog that spins around in our minds every day of our lives is a very important ingredient in determining the type of life experience we will ultimately have.

What type of life do you want to look back on when the day comes to lay it down? It can be helpful to ask ourselves what sort of influence we have had so far on the world around us and assess if we could use a course correction, large or small, while we still have the chance. The time will come when the choices for how we think, feel and act will no longer be our own to make. There will come a time when all our choices will have been made, at least for this life, at least for this personality.

When the day comes to lay our bones down in the dark earth, consume them in fire, or feed them to the mountain birds, we will become the summation of our whole life. For as long as breath lasts we have the power of choice. This leaves the future open, radically open. The whole story of an individual’s life cannot be known before the whole story has been played out – but once it has, it enters the domain of humanity’s inheritance. While we live, our lives are a whole piece with the generations around it and the society in which it unfolds. After we have passed, our lives leave ripples in the webs of cause and effect. Others will enjoy, or suffer, from the inheritance we leave in the same way we have when our generation was in the ever changing spotlight of psychobiological awareness. This is the truth. It is self-evident. It is spoken to us from the witness of our senses.

Our senses provide us with the gates through which our complex psychobiological phenomenon participates in reality. Our perceptual apparatus maintains an on-going physiological communion between our characters and their unique expression of the will to live and the worlds they find themselves participating in. They teach us there is no isolated self. They also teach that there cannot be a unitary self, for how could one compare the input of sound to that of sight or touch to that of smell? These are fundamentally different data streams, wholly unlike one another so they cannot be simply summed. Things are more subtle and complex than a simple summation. It is in the orchestration of many different parts that the on-going maintenance of our being takes place.

In Tibetan Buddhism the mind is considered a sense just like vision or taste. It too has the function of adapting ourselves to the environments in which we find our lives unfolding. It too has a data stream, one not of scent or color but one of thought. The words and images of the mind are the intimate arena where our choice making is most clearly expressed, for to some degree we choose what it is we will spend time thinking about. This is hardly the whole story however, as anyone who has spent any time minding the mind will know; things pop into our heads for often the most obscure of reasons. It is part of being a complex psychobiological phenomenon. Sometimes those winds of thought larger than our ego are pleasant and inspiring and other times they are terrifying and bring fear. However these bully thoughts appear, the power to make choices in the mental realm remains. This is an important point. When the bully thoughts arise our freedom to choose is not expressing itself in choosing what to think about but in how we will think about what has, quite literally, captured our attention.

Those things that capture us most deeply typically involve the interpersonal hopes and fears, loves and losses, and the most profound regrets and traumas we have experienced. We ruminate on these things in the process of adapting ourselves to our environment. For us social primates there is no environmental feature more dominate than our interactions with other human beings. Our complex psychobiological inheritance has seen to it that this is so, beginning with our long childhood and extending into our most intimate thoughts which are of necessity couched in a language we inherited and did not make ourselves. The result is that we have the images of the society’s roles and expectations within us. It is as if the mind sets up semi-automated puppets as stand-ins for the people we have met and the various roles they have played in the development of our psyche. We meet them in our dreams. We must deal with this internalized community just as surely as we must deal with the people we meet with each day. Many of them are quick to judge us and tell us what we must do at all times if we are not to be no-good bums tossed out of the tribe. Many of them cause exaggerated emotionally driven reactions in us before we even recognize our buttons are being pushed.

The start of wisdom in matters of mind seems to be when we fully recognize that our own thoughts might be wrong. It becomes possible to sit as a judge over one’s own thinking only when we lose the narcissism that fails to question our own cognitions with the same skepticism with which we greet other’s ideas. Some of what passes through the ever-changing thought streams is hardly worthy of entertaining at all and other bits are useful but packaged all wrong. In order not to get lost in the tides it is imperative that there be a place of reliable reference back to the real world associations the thoughts are involved with. This ability to stay grounded happens when the person’s innermost is able to trust reason as the rudder of the psyche. Reason is not the devil’s tool to trick us out of our faith in a good creation; reason is the expression of that faith by trusting in that which is.

The poetic turn of phrase, the emotionally colored perception of beauty, these and so many more of our cognitive experiences are obviously entwined with our emotional natures. In moments of emotional distress this harmony of heart and head is disrupted. The mind, as we say, gets carried away. Exaggeration and irrational conclusions can lead each other into loops that can spiral out of control until what the internal dialog is telling a person leaves them incapacitated for dealing skillfully with whatever is troubling them. Things in the mind will bully you around if you let them by causing you to tell yourself all kinds of things about your sense of worth that just do not stand up to a rational examination.

“Oh I never do anything right!” or “People always take advantage of me!” are typical of the kind of thoughts that might accompany an emotional outburst or period of emotional pain. Peace of mind can be reclaimed to the degree we learn to recognize when our thinking is going off the rails like this. Looked at with a calm, cool and collected mind it is obvious that all of us have done some things right and other things wrong. The statistical odds against “I never doing anything right” are beyond astronomical. Additionally, the definition of what is right for you implied by that first sentence is likely not at all what would actually express your true will but is nothing more than the mores of your family and culture. These are valuable but not the last word for you as you seek to work your way through the adventure of your own life. The second sentence is no less insane than the first. It is a willful blindness to all those other times when people extended compassion and aid to you in your struggles or celebrated with you your life’s sweet victories.

Perhaps a simple example will drive the point home. I hit my thumb with a hammer as I try to drive a nail. On some days I respond with a quick ‘Ouch!’ and carry on a bit more carefully. Other days, however, that same event might lead me to tears. On those days it is as if the pain found in this moment of working with the world has been lumped together with every disappointment and pain the world has ever inflicted on me. The world for me seems a mean and dangerous place which doesn’t really give a hoot about me at all. My mind echoes the sentiment that no one cares if I live or die or what it is like to experience things the way I do. This type of cognitive and emotional attack aims directly at our self-worth.

The hammers that really hurt are swung by tongues. We need to understand how hurt and frightened people strive very hard to control other people. To do so they develop a range of psychological manipulation techniques. These include the injection of guilt and threats of violence if the injection process is pointed out. It happens in families and it happens in nations. This temptation towards manufactured consent remains the dark underbelly of human interactions: ‘I am here to be satisfied’, this impulse runs, ‘you are here to be used.’ Ask yourself how often your speech involves getting others to change what they do and how they do what they do or otherwise dismisses their own style or character? Do you place the whole world into your personal boot camp and sergeant-over all you meet? Anyone who continues to look to others for a confirmation of their self-worth exposes themselves to these dark manipulations. It is in our resistance to their crazy-making that we come to find the path to our own personal best.

Once someone really understands that this is the lay of the land psychologically, they become capable of taking a-hold of the rudder for themselves. In every step we make towards trusting in our own ability to live our own lives well, we become a more genuine human being. Instead of being little more than a spokesman for an institution, or a holy book, or a dead relative, we become a voice speaking up for our real selves and their real needs. These are needs for love and respect as much as they are needs for food and shelter. We can tear each other’s dignity to shreds by calling one another heretics and apostates, the lost and damned, populating our world with the anti-Christs and devils of our angry damnations but this will not change our need to be understood one whit. Each of us wants to be loved by those we love, though many a tragedy is rooted in the fact that we cannot force someone to love us. Love is a gift that can only be accepted, we can only yield if we are to know another’s loving-kindness, but to yield is to open oneself up to their rejection. These are the issues we confront in the judgment of the heart and the on-going dialog with our conscience it provokes. Our loved ones, as they say, live in our hearts forever. They are trying to teach us the lesson of compassion. At times it is a very hard lesson.

If we had to tackle the whole psychological meaning and biological substratum of these things at once we would be overwhelmed. Instead the psyche unrolls these things in its own good time. What we experience is the tip of the iceberg where thoughts haunted by exaggerations and irrationality come into our conscious awareness. When they arise in these forms we can be sure that under the surface some of these heart-issues are stirring. What is downright liberating is when we understand that our conscious minds are meant to be the guiding light for all these semi-conscious aspects of our dreaming and transcendent self. The daylight mind with its ability to reason can teach the irrational and exaggerated thoughts just where they have lost their way. It is a cop out to expect your dreams to reveal to you what you should do. Harry Wilmer in Understandable Jung captures what we are discussing quite succinctly: “By accepting our fate, that is, our present reality, we take the first step to change our destiny. Our destination is another matter. Dreams do not tell us what to do or where to go. If one attributes such knowledge to the dream, one abdicates responsibility.”

Peace of mind comes, in part, from recognizing how comforting it is to encounter the same molecular world each and every morning when we awake. Though the evening’s psychic experiences may be all over the map, the powers of conscious awareness return to greet a grand continuity when we wake up. Because the environment we find ourselves in is always there much as it was the day before, the daylight world offers us a chance to improve our skills in living the one life we have as it unfolds here and now. If the daylight world followed the same a-causal associations we find in the nighttime world this would not be the case. Here is the human middle way, difficult to find, but once found it cannot be perturbed by either gods or devils. The day consciousness learns to ride on the deep of the night consciousness as a talented jockey rides their great and powerful horse. The day consciousness can become wise and loving only with the cooperation of the denizens of the deep, if the wisdom and love are to be more than a thin veneer over a raging beast inside just waiting for a chance to attack others for the painful self-abnegation it has been subjected to. Force your ego into the straitjacket of a saint and you only invoke the beast. If instead you work with the spirit that moves across these deep waters in a patient alchemy ruled by gentleness, then, it is taught, another type of wholeness, the one known as holiness, becomes possible. Not one that would castrate humans and turn them into angels who are forever gazing at visions of gods but instead a holiness born within our most genuine humanity.

We are here to carry on the mission of art, the art of living. This is the clay we are each working with for as long as we draw breath. In the slow leavening of the daily contemplative discipline we pursue a more spiritual life, yet hope to obtain, in the end, one that is more genuinely human. We are training not to fear what this entails as we come to recognize we are beings with cosmic roots dwelling in a sacred land.

“He practiced rational emotive imagery at least once a day by imagining that people were really acting stupidly, letting himself feel very angry about this, and then working on feeling only disappointment and frustrated, but not angry, about their stupid behavior.”
Albert Ellis, How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything, Yes Anything

I care deeply about the destruction of the ocean. Since my earliest childhood, playing in the waves has been one of the ways I most treasure participating in the powerful natural forces of our earth. I have taught my wife to bodysurf. I have taught my children. I deeply want my children to be able to teach their children the same joy of splashing in and swimming with, instead of against, the great currents of our planet. I tell you this so that you can understand when I say it is important to me that the oceans do not die on my watch. When I consider that what my society is doing today is likely creating the ocean die-off time-bomb that will haunt my children’s children’s children, and on, and on, for longer than my heart can bare to think about, anger lives inside me. Then I remember that even an ocean die-off is unlikely to remove the act of bodysurfing from the planet. That sweet kiss of flesh and salt water in which an organic return encapsulates billions of years of hard earned evolution by choosing to come back and play, to laugh in the tides, that will remain. The anger is gone. I am deeply disappointed in the people around me. I am frustrated they do not see and value as I see and value. But somehow in correcting my view of the ocean die-off it also alters my view of my fellow human creatures. No one is deliberately setting out to do evil; that’s one for the comic books. Tough, but there it is.

I have transformed the anger into frustration. Anger is susceptible to rage and rage to violence. Shutting the door on anger I now deal instead with issues around how well I am able to tolerate this frustration and disappointment. Working on my frustration tolerance is no walk in the park, but I can do so with a peace denied my angry mind. The key to shutting the door on anger instead of repressing it was using my reason to reframe my understanding.

Flights of fancy, day dreams, artistic inspirations and many other states of mind use the non-rational and irrational productively. The bounds of reason are far too limited to capture all that the heart needs to communicate. Symbolism and metaphor fill our art and poetry, drama and literature to compliment our understanding. Comedy and humor, so often the balm of life, very often depends on cognitive errors like exaggeration for their effect. We are called, at times, to be our own poets, artists and comedians, so it is important in mind training that we do not try and control our ever changing thoughts too much. If we grasp at all this too tightly we just kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Still, the art of cognitive training consists of catching the mind as it engages in irrational thoughts being passed off as rational – and firmly disputing those irrationalities. In our mind training, as in science, we are after more truth. We do not expect perfect or absolute truth. We do expect we can whittle away a bit at our own ignorance with work and practice. The key is to look for those thoughts that will not stand up to a rational analysis yet claim to be rational. These are the ones that are worth keeping an eye on. Their deceptive cloaks can make us feel as though we are being rational in the moments we are entertaining them. It is only when we step back and take a look at things more objectively that we recognize that what they are asserting is highly improbable, if not down-right hokey. Happiness, even sanity, depends on firmly disputing these cognitive errors.

The model of REBT teaches that when we are deeply disturbed we are telling ourselves something in a semi-divine imperative voice. We are lording over ourselves with a MUST. Which is giving you your greatest difficulty?

I must do well.
You must treat me well.
The world must treat me well.

We greatly prefer to do well and be treated well but we only hurt ourselves if we think we must be. That is nothing more than childishly magical thinking born of taking ego as divinity. Adults should recognize that human beings are fallible creatures and the world is an imperfect place. The sort of absolutism this kind of must-thinking represents is not at home in these conditions. It is not well adapted to reality so it can cause all sorts of trouble both for individuals and nations.

One of these variations of what Ellis calls MUSTerbation will likely be at the root of whatever it is that is disturbing you. These beliefs destroy peace of mind by judging your self-worth against unrealistic criteria. If you believe these types of things you have been set up to fail because these are really double binds. If these are your criteria for self-worth you just cannot win because even when you do well today, or someone treats you well today, or the world bestows its finest gifts upon you today, you know that tomorrow will most likely be a different matter. Win and you fail; fail and you fail; the Catch 22 of the double bind.

So of course, once we clearly see this, we simply must not use must. Right? And around and around we go. Here is where skill comes in. It teaches us to bring to the work a gentle touch, knowing we are most effective when guided by patience. The psyche is complex. As we have previously discussed there are many times that the shadow is working important work in maintaining our actual adaptation to the actual environments we find ourselves in. All that seems weak, sinful, sniveling, all those parts of ourselves that we are ashamed of and make outcasts, they need to have a place at the table of the Self too. No self improvement program started by the ego should dare to try and shed that shadow too quickly or too completely. Perfection is not for us. We can not even perfectly accept our imperfections – but we can imperfectly accept our imperfections and that is good enough.

REBT is a good tool to have on the cognitive tool belt. We all are prone to some crazy-making and we have it in our power to diminish or even, sometimes, remove it entirely. I have found myself using REBT periodically for decades. There are times it’s powerfully helpful to lay out the semi-conscious irrational beliefs that I have gathered from the on-going confrontations between my character and the world. Things shift around with the passing of the years and this technique has let me periodically tighten up the Ship of State, as it were. Writing out the irrational beliefs and writing out their disputations as taught is a bit silly but it has had surprisingly powerfully positive effects for me and thousands of others. Your mileage may vary but I am convinced that some form of disputing the mind’s irrational beliefs is required for mental health.

It is also required for social health. A society that cannot hold its own irrational beliefs up for examination loses one of its most effective means of navigating events and finding appropriately proportionate responses. The idea dominate in the over-developed world that the earth simply must give us the resources we need to continue feeding Homo Colossus is one of those irrational beliefs. Seen through the lens of mindful ecology our accelerating use of dirty oil, dirty coal, and dirty nuclear energy in the face of climate change facts is just a way of saying to the earth, like a somewhat ungrateful bully, “you owe me.” “Look at all I have done in my building and dreaming, creating technologies that mimic the magic of the gods, it cannot all have been for naught!” This is just more MUSTerbation and now it is doing a deadly dance with All-or-Nothing thinking. It implies, no, it insists that the only way forward is more of the same or “by god we will blow the whole thing up.” Isn’t that how the rest of the semi-conscious threat-thought runs in the haunted basement of the public square?

Working on our minds is the most direct route to working on the issues of ecology.

The REBT exercises train the mind to be on the lookout for temptations towards exaggerated conceit on the one hand, or self-damning on the other. These are the mistakes that accompany irrational beliefs. If we allow ourselves to have too high and mighty evaluation of our place then the slightest ego threat is perceived as an attack on our fundamental worth and can lead quickly to violent rage. In the other direction self damning leads to depression by confusing the guilt that might rightly belong to an action taken in the past which we have come to regret, with guilt about our very existence. We are confused by thinking not that I did a terrible thing but that I am a terrible person. This cripples the solution to past terrible actions, namely, future non-terrible actions.

These cognitive errors represent the human mind claiming god-like powers. This is rather obvious in the commands behinds the MUST but its not hard to see in the All-or-Nothing’s black and white perfectionism either, and so on for the rest of the cognitive errors we are prone to. This western mind training becomes a way of keeping in touch with the genuinely human. This is where, as the pages of our life history and our community’s history unfold, we will do many things well but not all things, others will often treat us well but not always, and the world will take the most exquisite care of us, furnishing us with everything we need to survive, even thrive, but not always.

Have you ever awoke thinking of yourself as a scientist? Not like a mad scientist out of a B-movie (at least not on a good morning!). No, not awakening with that kind of scientific spirit but one of burning curiosity and gratitude that one can learn. This scientific spirit is more Goethe than Newton. To mix references a bit, this view always senses there is a large ocean of the real far beyond that which we capture with our knowledge, confined as it is to the human shore. And that ocean beckons us to come play.

In the morning we are greeted with a fresh opportunity to gather experience and ponder it. Core questions of worth and meaning stand steady in this inner sanctum of our waking awareness once we have firmly set our intention, our will. What has life taught us so far about being wise and compassionate? What can we share with others that will make us happy and be of benefit to them as well? How can I be of service to the earth? To find the answers we can don the helmet of a humble scientist, one who touches nature gently and with respect.

We of the collapsing age get to learn aspects of the ecologically traumatized soul with a precise knowledge unprecedented in previous generations. Our minds encounter globalized suffering ecosystems tracked by satellite. Scientists of the psyche, contemplating ecology humbles us before both the immensity of cultural evolution and the guiding wisdom that has, so far, kept our species alive yet now seems threatened on every side. Those of us called to contemplative practice have an opportunity to aid the extroverted Western culture with our introversions but more than that, I believe, with our deep dive directly into the wound in the psyche that creates such blindness. I believe it just might be that in our practice we change the probabilities of what kind of future our species is going to experience.

For the scientist the future is open ended. There is no pre-determined conclusions to the countless life-stories in play throughout all sentient beings, all beings with psyche. Nor is the final fate of the non-sentient intelligences in our rocks and rivers, planets and galaxies understood well enough to be anything more than a start of a sketch of a possibility. But oh how we want to know the future! Do you know that some of the oldest writing we have discovered are the questions and answers of fortune telling recorded by ancient Chinese ancestors on turtle shell? ‘Will the king’s son live?’, ‘Will we win the war with our neighbors?’

One day the human being wakes up in the midst of all of this fully interconnected emergent phenomenon, this universe. We didn’t ask for it, it is just there. We soon learn the one thing we can know for certain about this being human in this universe is that one day we will die and go to sleep within it again. Between those two days of intimacy with silence and emptiness every sentient being’s life unfolds. Personality arises around an awareness of self and world that just IS, that is just a given. Every night personality submerges again into what is, for itself, the welcoming rest of silence and emptiness. Every morning personality awakes again to its awareness of self and world, always self and world, never just self, never just world. That awareness that manifests itself to us each moment is sustained atop chemical complexities we can scarcely imagine, heirs as we are to the evolutionary mysteries in the kingdom of the flesh. That awareness grows over the course of a lifetime as naturally as the limbs of the body do. The awareness grows by learning more and more about the self and the world. With experience a light of understanding arises, we see it shaping sentient being’s actions and reactions to the events of their autobiographies. Awareness drives us to make hypothesis and test them against the real world. We need to do this, we are compelled to do this because our hearts drive us to know what is real and discard the delusional. If love is real, how else could we find it? If others are real, how else could we find them? Our lives consist of our unique character in dynamic relationships with others and the elements around us, questing for wisdom. Our lives are the laboratory in which psyche and flesh consummate their union.

Seeing through these eyes we know we can never have all the answers but are perfectly happy trusting that which is giving what answers we have. Not that we really have a choice, there is no magic path to human omniscience. However, if we choose to believe that love is real then the fact that such delight can exist sets the heart at ease. There is a peace that comes when you figure out it is rational to trust that which exceeds your understanding, that ocean of the real beyond our human shore. Call it faith, a belief in the unseen, but it is not blind faith since it comes from your consideration of your own experience and what it directly teaches you to believe to be most probable. It is not a castle in the sky faith but something solid, there to greet you each morning. It brings a peace that is not threatened by the huge unknown and unknowable which beset us on all sides every moment of our lives. “I trust this is not all a meaningless nightmare but I sure do not know what it is all about.”

Fundamentalists are used to feeling like they have all the answers. Often illiterate or dogmatically one-sided in their studies, they confront the world’s history of ideas as foolishness compared to their own special brand of spiritual wisdom. This is not to disparage the very real wisdom that comes to anyone open to learning from life, regardless of whether or not they ever read a book. We, however, live in a literate culture. To bypass the study time required to become acquainted with our inheritance and then claim superiority because of it is due to what is basically an act of spiritual magic. They claim to know everything they need to know because they have special knowledge, a gnosis denied the unwashed masses: I said just the right words in converting to my personal lord and savior and now I’m always right in arguments about social values; I publically state, just right, ‘I know this church is true’ and now can do no wrong so lie for god whenever asked, I’ve said aloud ‘there is no god but Allah’ and now can destroy the infidels who refuse to repeat the same magic words etc. after sorry etc. All this is just intellectual dishonesty. To point this out is not to be an intellectual snob. I refuse to admit to any part of that double bind framework the fundamentalists try to force such conversations into. (‘Claim to be a fool and I’ll agree, claim to be wise and I’ll call you a fool in the ways of god.’ It really helps to learn to recognize these noxious things whenever they rear their ugly heads.)

It is better to wake up each morning clearly recognizing you do not know all the answers but knowing you do have a few. It is also good recognizing that it is in the nature of our partnership with the unknown that today you will discover more answers as your understanding grows. The point of any mind training is to increase the skill by which our ego allows the growth to occur without undue interference so that it benefits from the process. To increase any skill the craftsman learns to cherish their tools. In the search for truth our tool is the mind. Scientists recognize the mind plays tricks on us, easily persuading us to believe what we want to believe and to refuse to believe things we fear. We must remain watchful, ever on the lookout for confirmation biases and all sorts of other categories of cognitive dishonesties. These are the costs associated with thinking’s benefits, costs built into our fundamental cognitive techniques. The mind uses heuristics as short cuts by chunking information about what has been learned in the past that might apply to the present. Fine. Heuristics is one thing, running around the cage of cognitive dissonance and double binds is something else entirely. So science: it is a method of collecting evidence and pondering over what it means using the thinking apparatus we have as it actually is with all its strengths and weaknesses. In this way the scientist seeks to assign various bits of data their proper weight in the grand scheme of things. Contemplatives are scientists of the psyche in this sense. Nothing more but also nothing less. This humble science is the fruit of Faust Part 2, born having learned the hubris science of Mephistopheles in Part 1 did not deliver the goods.

Being a scientist is how we are a student of the universe. Adults have completed their education and don their lab coats. The laboratory consists of this earth life, just as it is. In this life each of us will be challenged to find work so that our flesh may eat. The work will chafe our souls even as it refines them. It is foolish to deny the path of work for spirituality, as if they were not interdependently complimentary. In this life each of us will be challenged to find relationships with other human beings that are both trusting and intimate so that our souls may quench their thirst. In this quest too our souls will be refined, guided, tormented, and ultimately healed by the love we find in the ground of being. Healed? How? The wisdom of our ancestors is teaching us that there is a surprise hiding in the core of our DNA. We touch it when we open our hearts by respecting the best hopes and dreams of our ancestors, seeing how our own falling in love, maturing in love, being heart-broke by love, how all of it is the same and that for all it is equally beautiful. This timeless AHA! that has so inspired the psyche of humankind that it’s religious instinct became its deepest, what is it? I think it is simply a reconciliation. It is how peace is brought to the war of the elements: the war of the sexes, the war of flesh and fang, the war of the cold-hearted reptile and the warm-hearted mammal, and in the psyche this reconciliation manifests itself as faith, an end of the war of the mortal against the immortals. We need not be jealous of the gods like the Titans nor bewail our fate as do the Hungry Ghosts blinded by greed to the feast that is set out before them. It is a blessing to be happy in our humanity.

These posts take up subjects in small sequences. For most readers starting at the beginning of a cycle and reading them in order is recommended. The subjects covered can be accessed using the subject categories found below.

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